ABSTRACT
Tourism and hospitality have become key global economic activities as expectations with regard to our use of leisure time have evolved, attributing greater meaning to our free time. While the growth in tourism has been impressive, India’s share in total global tourism arrivals and earnings is quite insignificant. It is an accepted fact that India has tremendous potential for development of tourism. This anomaly and the various underlying factors responsible for it are the focus of our study. The objective being determination of customer preferences for multi attribute hybrid services like tourism, so as to enable the state tourism board to deliver a desired combination of intrinsic attributes, helping it to create a sustainable competitive advantage, leading to greater customer satisfaction and positive word of mouth. Conjoint analysis (CJA) has been used for this purpose, which estimates the structure of a consumer’s preferences, given his/her overall evaluations of a set of alternatives that are pre-specified in terms of levels of different attributes. Tourism is a service industry; therefore, there are inherent challenges with service marketing that affect how the tourism product is communicated to the consumer public. According to Williams (2006), tourism and hospitality have become key global economic activities as expectations with regard to our use of leisure time have evolved, attributing greater meaning to our free time. This results in marketing having potentially greater importance in tourism than in other industries but sadly potential that is not always fulfilled (Morgan and Pritchard, 2002). Williams (2006) believes that a major reason for such unfulfilled potential lies in most tourism marketing focusing on the destination or outlet (in other words the products being offered) and lacking focus on the consumer. Therefore, while tourism boards may already use a number of planned and controlled marketing activities, this chapter purports that they could also exploit the destination image enhancement opportunities that exist through developing an insight about the customer/tourist preferences and delivering the desired service package.
